' No Time for Sergeants'; Andy Griffith Stars as the Genial G. I.

By BOSLEY CROWTHER

Published: May 30, 1958

NOW that Will Stockdale, Air Force draftee and highly fictitious hero of Mac Hyman's "No Time for Sergeants," has been parlayed through the novel and a play into the world's most improbable but popular conscript this side of the Good Soldier Schweik, it is natural that he should continue to overwhelm people from the screen. That he will do in the filmed "No Time for Sergeants," which arrived at the Music Hall yesterday.

For this Mervyn LeRoy screen translation of the novel and Ira Levin's play lacks nothing in the way of comic content that made for the popularity of its predecessors. And it has the same marvelous Andy Griffith, who created Will on the stage, to go right on creating chaos with his own staggering simplicity.

Mr. Griffith's one previous screen appearance was as the big cheese of "A Face in the Crowd," a role of such monstrous proportions that it failed to arouse much sympathy. But as Will in this present minor classic, he should not only win new friends but also establish the character so firmly that the memory of it will be indelible. We strongly suspect that Mr. Griffith will have a hard time shedding himself of the aura of Will.

He is so perfectly the hero of Mr. Hyman's happy service comedy that he makes both himself and all the madness that swirls around him seem briefly plausible. Whoever heard of a hayseed so amiable and uninformed that he'd take being drafted as an honor bestowed by Uncle Sam? No one! And yet Mr. Griffith, with his sunny, smiling face and Southern drawl, his upsetting candor and his frightening lack of subterfuge or guile, is precisely the fellow to make you believe that such a phenomenon could be. He takes so enthusiastically to being drafted that he makes the normal malingerers look like bums.

And whoever heard of anybody being so thoroughly anarchistic as to think that a sergeant could be a nice fellow? Well, not Myron McCormick, we'll tell you that! As the comfortably routined top-kick who suddenly has cast upon him this draftee who makes a strange appearance of wanting to treat him like a friend, Mr. McCormick reacts precisely as any well-educated cynic would. He becomes a sly thing of dark suspicions and fatally injudicious moves.

This is the crux of the story, which John Lee Mahin has shaped for the screen and Mr. LeRoy has directed with a generous allowance for popeyed farce. The sergeant's unjustified suspicions and failure to estimate his man lead from one cataclysm to another. And that's the fun of the film.

In addition to Mr. Griffith and Mr. McCormick, others who are dandy in their roles are Nick Adams as Will's timid sidekick and Murray Hamilton as a wise-guy who gets "whomped." In one scene where he and Mr. McCormick try unsuccessfully to get Mr. Griffith soused, Mr. Hamilton gives a delirious imitation of a dizzily top-heavy drunk. James Milhollan is howling funny as a prissy psychiatrist and Don Knotts, Howard Smith and Will Hutchins are lively in various military roles.

For the record, there is in this picture one comedy scene set in the washroom that is franker than anything of the sort we've seen yet. It might be seen by some as a bit distasteful. But it gets the biggest laugh in the show.

The stage show at the Music Hall features the appearance of the Tuskegee Institute Choir, first singing a program of spirituals and then participating in a revue with a Mississippi River showboat motif. Also in this portion are the tap-dancer Peg Leg Bates and the Music Hall Corps de Ballet and Rockettes.